Dappled Light on Stream, Olympic National Park, Washington

One of my favorite things about walking through dense forest is the dappled light that reaches the forest floor when. Occasionally it will serendipitously fall in a great spot to really draw something out. After passing this mountain stream on the way to Sol Duc Falls we were inclined to stop again briefly on the way back. About mid way up the stream from the footbridge there was this small spot where, among the soft light hitting most of the forest floor, on particular mossy rock was directly lit and stood out subtly from the rest of the scene. I'm not sure it really carries through to this photograph, I may have actually diminished in impact in processing the image, but that's what I tried to capture here.

At this point I had put my ND400 filter away and didn't bother to dig it out to do a proper long exposure here. Instead I set up the tripod and took four identical exposures at a modestly 'long' 1/2 second. I blended the exposures together to give the effect of one longer exposure. I'm not as happy with this approach as with simply doing one long exposure (which when you factor in the time I just wasted in post-processing would have been much faster in the long run). As a rule of thumb I'll have to just keep an ND filter handy any time I plan to shoot waterfalls.

I did intend to keep up with one Olympic upload per day this week but missed yesterday - I'll try to compensate with another photo tomorrow (that's for John, who called me out on it). :)